From faster approvals to hiring more workers, governments need to step up: experts
Peter Armstrong · CBC News
Talking to someone like you, who is “doing their own research” is infuriating and pointless. It is impossible to convince someone who just rejects mainstream research and misinterprets information “on their own”.
Your personal research on this topic is wrong. House prices shot up everywhere in the world due to the pandemic, but less in Tokyo than elsewhere. Population went down in cities everywhere in the world due to the pandemic and WFH, so acting like this is some trend of decreasing population in Tokyo is just deeply ignorant. New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, all had a decrease in population due to the pandemic.
affordable doesn’t mean “cheaper” it means “cheaper as a percentage of income”
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That is precisely how Tokyo is more affordable than Canada. Housing prices are WAY less than half of New York. It’s truly remarkable that you think New York is more affordable than Tokyo!
I also lived in Japan and speak the language fluently, and I met a lot of people like you who barely spoke the language and came back home acting like experts. Here is a $1.18 million USD home in Meguro city. It is over 2300 square feet! Garage, terrace, three large bedrooms, and way more nearby amenities than most Canadian cities. Also, this is freaking Tokyo! Comparing it to Hamilton is ridiculous. And yet, it’s still more affordable!
Affordable housing doesn’t exist for one simple reason, there are too many owners who benefit from using their housing as an investment.
And not ever because there is not enough housing?? After WW2, Canada built tons of new homes for returning vets. Are you saying housing would have been JUST AS affordable if we didn’t? That’s such a ridiculous idea, I don’t know how someone could believe it. Yes, make it hard to treat housing as an investment, but we also need people like you to stop obstructing supply.
Mainstream research has led us to the situation we’re in. The politicians don’t want to discuss the actual fix because it will get them voted out of office. Passing a policy that drops housing prices by 50% wouldn’t even be enough to make major cities affordable here in Canada, it needs to be somewhere in the 70-80% range.
Population went down in cities everywhere? You’re calling me out for doing my own research, but you’re just straight up lying now. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20404/vancouver/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.97%25 increase from 2020. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.03%25 decline from 2020. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20402/toronto/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.94%25 increase from 2020.
That listing you posted, there’s so many things wrong with what you that I don’t think you have ever lived there let alone speak the language. First, It’s nowhere near 2300 square feet of house. Those bedrooms are reasonable, but I wouldn’t call them large (8jo, 140ish square feet for two of them and 235ish square feet for the big one), That entire upper floor is maybe 800 square feet in total, and the downstairs is smaller because half of it is a garage. It’s probably a 1400-1500 square foot home. Second, It’s 40 years old. That may not seem like a lot in North America, but that’s nearing the end of it’s life in Japan given their construction. Third, it’s 14 minutes from a train station, but not a JR rail station. The Toyoko line is a private line, and that station gets nothing but local service. It’s a 30-40 minute ride to anywhere in central Tokyo. It has a garage for a reason, because a car is essentially required for that family.
We have enough housing in Canada, there are just under 17 million units for 40 million people. Given that people live together and have children regularly, that means there’s no problems.
The issue is an investment problem, how much money would you spend if you knew that no matter what you put in, you’d always get more back? That’s what housing has been for the last 30 years… Until we remove the profit from housing investment (but leave the profit for construction, renovation, etc) we will never fix the problem. Building more housing doesn’t make the land under it any cheaper, and the land cost is the problem.
How can you say we’re in this mess due to mainstream research when we are not following mainstream research! That makes no sense.
Oh my sweet Jesus, did you post the metro population of various cities and claim that the population of those cities never went down?? The metro population of Tokyo also never went down! Yikes, your whole comment is a mess!
No housing expert or urban economist agrees with you that we have sufficient housing, but I give up trying to reason with you. Have a good day!
The mainstream research says keep building to become affordable, we’ve been building at max capacity for almost a decade now… and we’re further away from affordable than we were 10 years ago.
What’s wrong with using the metro values? How are they less valid than a smaller core city value? A metro value is going to better represent the population, the city lines are extremely arbitrary.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population Yes Metro Tokyo has declined every year since 2018
Lots of economists agree with me, including Nobel prize winning ones. We need land value taxes to reign in land values and speculation, this current problem of rent seeking behavior was predicted literally hundreds of years ago and they came up with the solution as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
The CMHC says we need to build an additional 3.5 million homes by 2030 to bring affordability back to 2004 levels, and yet we’re currently only able to produce 250k a year (so about half of the number we need) and already every construction site has a help wanted sign. How the fuck is that supposed to work? How is anything the government is even talking about going to reach that number? The answer is simple: it won’t. It’s all smoke and mirrors from politicians says “look at us, we’re doing something” and in a decade, it will be worse than it was today despite all these programs.
The only realistic way we hit that number is if the Canadian government institutes a draft and forces those people to build homes overriding all zoning and probably even appropriating land while they’re at it.
